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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

US Power Plant Shut Down by Malware-Infected USB Stick

In a case that bears strong similarities to the highly publicized Stuxnet attack on Iran, two US power plants have befallen the same fate, becoming infected with malware via USB sticks, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

In one of the two cases, both of which occurred last year, it’s believed that a technician working for an outside contractor unwittingly introduced malware designed to steal personal information after using his own USB stick. The incident led to the power plant being taken offline for three weeks before the virus could be eliminated.

“When the IT employee inserted the drive into a computer with up-to-date antivirus software, the antivirus software produced three positive hits. Initial analysis caused particular concern when one sample was linked to known sophisticated malware,” said the DHS Computer Readiness Emergency Team (ICS-CERT) in its report.

Here with more analysis on the news is Contributing Editor John Cassaretto, who appeared on this morning’s NewsDesk segment with Kristin Feledy. The article continues below:

Researchers say that the malware was later discovered on two engineering work stations that perform critical tasks relating to the control of the power station. Because neither of these stations had any effective back up, the power plant was taken offline for three weeks.

ICS-CERT also says that a second power plant was infected by a similar method, only this time the virus is believed to have been more sophisticated. It said that this infection led to ten computers in a turbine control system becoming infected.

Researchers didn’t reveal too much about the nature of the malware, but they stressed that the two incidents highlighted the need for better controls over the use of removable media in critical installations like power plants.

“ICS-CERT continues to emphasize that owners and operators of critical infrastructure should develop and implement baseline security policies for maintaining up-to-date antivirus definitions, managing system patching, and governing the use of removable
media,” said the report.

“Such practices will mitigate many issues that could lead to extended system downtimes.”

ICS-CERT warned that USB sticks are a notoriously simply but effective way for hackers to gain entry to critical industrial installations, saying that it expected further such incidents to take place in future. The use of USB sticks as a means of entry was highlighted last year, when it was revealed that both the Stuxnet worm and the Flame malware had infected Iranian nuclear facilities in the same way.

About Mike Wheatley

Mike Wheatley is a senior staff writer at SiliconANGLE. He loves to write about Big Data and the Internet of Things, and explore how these technologies are evolving and helping businesses to become more agile.
Before joining SiliconANGLE, Mike was an editor at Argophilia Travel News, an occassional contributer to The Epoch Times, and has also dabbled in SEO and social media marketing. He usually bases himself in Bangkok, Thailand, though he can often be found roaming through the jungles or chilling on a beach.
Got a news story or tip? Email Mike@SiliconANGLE.com.